Preparing for Blindness

I’m losing my sight, and there is not much I can do to prevent it. What I can do is use the time I do have to prepare for my eventual blindness. The way I see it, it’s kinda like building a fallout shelter. I’m investing the vision I have now into building a set of tools that minimize the impact of my vision loss later on.

Where in the 50s they built physical shelters and stocked them with enough canned foods and comic books to outlive the nuclear winter, I have to find a way to support myself, and keep myself entertained until an eventual cure.

Comic Books
I consume a lot of news online, most via Google Reader. I consume some 500+ articles from 100+ sites on a daily basis. I don’t think that VoiceOver+Chrome is going to be able to support that kind of habit addiction. I’d like to build an app that puts a voice UI first, and doesn’t add it as a way to support ‘accessibility’.

Using RSS and iSpeech it shouldn’t be too difficult to build an app that makes it easy to consume large amounts of news without having to use one’s eyes. Even better, its usefulness extends beyond the blind community; think commuters.

Anyways, that’s one way I’m thinking about how to minimize my disability using software. I’m sure I will need others as well, but I’ll cover those later.